Dear Catarina,
You’ve gone home. You’ve gone back to the United States. The butcher you knew on the base was the one who told me. He said, “Oh, the North American girl? She went back home. She was never really happy here.” Don’t worry. I’m not angry. But I don’t believe that you were never happy here. I think you were happy with me, no? Or maybe all along I was mistaken. Did I do something to make you leave? I don’t know what’s happened. For days, I kept expecting you in the evenings only to find that you didn’t show. I sat at the kitchen table where I had a view of the street and looked for hours for the shape of you lit against the streetlights, walking on your toes as you always did toward my front door. Every day, I grew more confused about where you could be and why I hadn’t heard from you. I was going crazy. And I was worried that something had happened to you. You can’t imagine the thoughts that ran through my head! So on Friday I went to the base even though I know I wasn’t supposed to, even though a hundred times you told me not to, and discreetly I asked around about you. Then the butcher told me you had gone (he really is a foul-smelling man, as you had said). You can’t imagine how much I miss you. I hardly know the point of getting up anymore in the morning if I’m not going to see you at night. Are you coming back? Are you okay? Please write to me.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I was so happy to receive your letter. Thank you for explaining everything. I can’t believe it! A baby! We made a baby! I told my mother, who is very excited, too. I can’t believe it. We have good medical care here in Panamá, but of course I understand that you want to be near your own family. When may I come to visit? I want to put my hands on your belly. I want to see you with a baby in you. Of course I’ll also come when the baby is born. I could move to the United States permanently. I could apply for a visa now. Or maybe you want to move back to Panamá so we can raise the child here? I’ll wait to hear what you prefer. I’m so excited,
mi pajarita,
I could burst! I’ll wait for your next letter so we can make our plans.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I’ve been checking my box every day, but so far, no letters from you. I hope you haven’t sent one that got lost. I can imagine it drifting off the plane and twirling down into the ocean, being eaten by a fish. Or maybe you haven’t had time to write. I hope everything is fine. I think about you and the baby constantly. I was almost fired from my job the other day because I fell asleep on my lunch break dreaming of the two of you.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I received your latest letter three days ago. It left me confused. I don’t believe you would have written the things you did if you understood how I felt about you, how I still feel about you! I understand that you don’t want to come back to Panamá. I understand that you want to raise our child in the United States. There are more opportunities in your country than here. I know how important it is to you that she has a good education. But I don’t understand why you’re telling me not to come there. I can apply for a visa. I have a good record. We can get married. We can spend every day for the rest of our lives together. We can fall asleep with each other every night. We can raise our child together. I don’t know what you mean when you say, “It’s not a good time here.” Tell me when will be a good time. I will wait for the good time. I miss you and I want to see our baby, who, if my calculations are correct, will be here in the world soon. Please write.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
A baby girl? I’m sure she’s beautiful. I hope you are fine, too.
Yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
It’s been a long time. I didn’t think, not in a hundred years, that I would feel this way about you. All of my original feelings are still here, under the surface. They will always be here if you want to find them. But now
I don’t know what to say. I can hardly believe it was you who wrote the letter. Why did you tell me not to come there? And why will it be better for everyone if I stay away? And how can I forget about you? I know, because of other things you wrote and because of things you told me when we were together, that it’s not you saying this! It’s your parents, forcing it upon you. They don’t believe I’m a suitable father because I’m Panamanian, because I don’t have enough money, because they don’t like my brown skin. I know you told me about what the United States used to be like, how the people with color in their skin had to use different bathrooms and different drinking fountains and different seats in the movie theaters and on the buses. But that was a long time ago, no? Everyone knows now that that was wrong, no? I don’t believe that people there haven’t changed. I don’t see how it would be a problem for me there. She’s our baby, after all. She’s partly made of me. I just want to see her. Please, Catarina. I don’t know what else to say but please. Show me that you’re still the courageous, impudent girl I knew. Don’t listen to your parents or anyone else but yourself. You don’t need to do anything but open the door. I ask nothing else of you. I only want to see her.
Still yours,
Gatún Gallardo
Dear Catarina,
I know you’re sorry. Did you think I didn’t know that? And yet, to see my name, and only those two words, and your signature afterward. I cried like a child. I cried like a man who has lost everything.
But I’ll honor your wishes. I’ve only ever wanted to give you what you desire. I’ll stay here. I won’t try to come there. I won’t try to contact her. You can tell her whatever you want about me, I suppose.
I’m returning to this letter after a few days. I don’t know what else to say. I will be thinking of you always. I have photographs of you. The one of you in the hammock, after you fell out the first time, is my favorite. I look at it every day. Even after all of this, I can’t help but love you. I love her, too, of course. Maybe she’ll sense that even though I won’t be there to tell her. This will be my last letter.
Yours with a heavy heart,
Gatún Gallardo
I stared at that last one for a long time, my heart thrumming in my chest. The handwriting was all capital letters. In the earlier ones he had drawn little cartoonish sketches after the signature, which was always his full name and the only thing in cursive.
It took me nearly an hour to read them all, translating in my head as I went. A few times, I had to stop and look something up in my Spanish-English dictionary, the filmy plastic cover rolled back at the edges, soft as petals.
When I gently laid down the last letter, I could see translucent circles near the edges where the oil from my skin had seeped into the paper. I pinched the paper again between my fingertips in exactly the same spots and slid it with shaky hands, along with all the others, back into the folder.
Both Lucy and my mother
are there to bid me good-bye the day I leave. It’s a Sunday, three days after Lucy arrived. I would have liked more time at home with them both, to make sure this arrangement was going to work out, that Lucy would be able to handle my mother and that my mother would at least tolerate Lucy, but everything about this trip was so last-minute that there wasn’t much I could do about the accelerated timing. I found the letters and I made a reservation. I was afraid that if I thought about it all for too long, I wouldn’t go through with it at all.
Lucy and my mother are sitting together at the kitchen table, my mother doing the crossword and trying to persuade Lucy to help with the clues she can’t unravel, and Lucy eating a bowl of cereal. Next to my mother’s elbow is a paper towel with a heap of eggshell and the white of a hard-boiled egg on top. She always digs out the yolk and eats it first.
“Good morning,” Lucy bellows as I walk in.
“Good morning!” I bellow back, smiling. I feel good, alive with the frisson of anticipation. I feel like anything is possible.
“What’s all this yelling?” My mother frowns.
I pour myself a bowl of dry cereal and sit at the table with them, and the three of us pass the time talking about my mother’s puzzle and then, for a while, about what Evanston used to look like before a movie theater and glass condominiums and an Urban Outfitters moved right into the middle of it. “They closed Sherman Restaurant!” my mother exclaims at one point, and Lucy gasps and throws a hand to her mouth at the indignity.
When the doorbell rings, my mother gets up to answer it.
“Hello, Catherine. Happy New Year.”
George Grabowski is standing on our front step wearing a Chicago Bears parka. In his hands he’s holding a potted plant, the base wrapped in metallic cellophane.
“I brought you this,” he says, proffering the plant. “New life. New year. I thought it would be appropriate.”
“George Grabowski. Our neighbor,” I whisper to Lucy. “He’s in love with my mother.”
Lucy raises her eyebrows.
He isn’t bad-looking, George Grabowski. He has ruddy cheeks, and flecks of gray in his eyebrows and sideburns, and he keeps himself clean-shaven. But he has never, in all the years I’ve known him, made any sort of progress in his quest to woo my mother. I was there when he told her once that she was beautiful. My mother replied, “Well, perhaps I should make you an appointment with an eye doctor, then?” George managed to look only amused, not crestfallen.
“Hello, Mira,” George says, waving at me past my mother.
“Happy New Year,” I say. I grin at Lucy.
She smiles and whispers, “She doesn’t like him?”
I shake my head.
George tries his best to keep up the conversation at the door several minutes longer while Lucy and I try our best to listen without appearing as though we’re listening. When my mother walks back to the table a few minutes later, the plant in hand, she says, “What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“Take care of it,” I mumble with a half-eaten spoonful of cereal in my mouth.
She stares at me blankly. “How?”
“You took care of me. I think you can figure out how to take care of a plant.”
Lucy takes the pot out of my mother’s hands and examines it as if she’s appraising it. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you.”
The taxi arrives not more than an hour later. The driver carries my suitcase to the curb and drops it in the trunk with a thud, letting it fall awkwardly against the spare tire, then waits in the car while I say my good-byes. Lucy looks on from inside the house while my mother and I stand in the front yard by the flagpole we never use. The ground is damp from melted snow and my feet sink a little into the soil.
“So you’re leaving,” my mother says. “For how long again?”
“Three weeks.” I’m shivering with nerves.
“Well, I wish you had told me about it earlier.”
“Come on. It’s not that long,” I say. There’s a certain pleading laced through my voice that she not make this more difficult than it already is. My determination is fragile. If she makes enough of a fuss, I might cave. I might stay. “It will be over before you know it.”
She pinches her lips together and stares at my shoulder. “I meant to ask you, have you seen my black beaded necklace?”
She’s asked me the same question three times in the last week. “It’s on your dresser.”
She nods, her nose blooming pink from the cold. “Three weeks is a long time,” she says.
I wince.
“Who knows what could happen in three weeks,” she says.
“Nothing will happen.”
Everything around us is quiet except for the clink of the rope beating against the flagpole in the breeze.
She sighs, then smiles. “Have fun.”
“Your black beaded necklace is on your dresser,” I say.
Two
Orientation
All the times I imagined it, I thought that what I would see from an airplane window would be this: rivers as thin as dried earthworms, treetops as lush as clumps of moss, patches of farmland laid out like pressed handkerchiefs, mountain valleys rounded like soft dimples, the earth in miniature. But the only thing outside the window is white air with, occasionally, bands of sunlight radiating through. It’s beautiful and breathtaking, being that close to the marbled sky, but it isn’t what I hoped to see.
The man in the seat next to me smells of a garlicky sweat, a stench that lifts off him each time he stirs, and he often does, stretching his arms over his head and cracking his fingers. I try to ignore him and read the copy of
Principles of Geology
that I brought with me. I got it in high school as a graduation gift from my earth sciences teacher. The pages are worn and highlighted and notated and dog-eared from all the times I’ve read it. The man touches me once when I doze off, to announce excitedly, “Drink cart,” and point to a flight attendant standing in the aisle with a plastic cup raised in her hand like a trophy. I order water. He orders a tomato juice with lime and a tiny bottle of vodka.
The two of us, along with at least a hundred others, are en route from Chicago to Houston. From there I’ll continue to Panama City, Panama. I have no idea what to expect. I know everything I’ve read about it in my guidebook—how much to pay for a taxi from the airport, what the temperature will be like, what areas of the city to avoid, what kinds of payments merchants will accept. But that’s all superficial. I don’t know what really to expect, underneath all of that.
After he finishes his drink, the man next to me says, “So, do you speak English?”
“Me?”
“You know English?”
“Yes.” I don’t feel like telling him that I know Spanish, too. Not absolutely, totally fluently, but well enough. When I was younger, my mother tried to teach me a little—the words for colors and numbers and animals and foods—anything she had learned when she lived in Panama. When we exhausted her vocabulary, she sent me every Wednesday night for a year to a Spanish class at the YMCA. She was always like that, pushing me to spend my time learning and studying and learning and studying because, she said, that was the way to become more than you knew you were. By the time I got to high school and started taking Spanish as an elective, I was the best student in my class. My teachers couldn’t believe how naturally it came to me. And they couldn’t believe, when they heard about it, that I hadn’t minded, all those years, taking Spanish classes outside of school. It wasn’t exactly that I hadn’t minded, though, as much as that I hadn’t known better. I didn’t know until I was older that not everyone my age was spending weeknights learning a second language. I didn’t consider the reason for it, either, but I think it boiled down to this: Spanish was just something my mother had fallen in love with, the way other parents are in love with music or baseball or books. She wanted to share it with me the way people want to share the things that mean something to them with those they care about. And she wanted to give me a connection to some part of my background. She wanted to hold open a doorway to myself.